Dear BLUE seafarers

We are happy to invite you to join us for the sixth BLUE reading seminar on 10 September 2021 from kl 15.00 – 17.00. At the seminar we will read and discuss the book Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds by Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler (University of Westminster Press, 2021).

Anthropocene Islands argues that the island has emerged as less an object of study and more as a mode of thinking in the Anthropocene. Islands, far from the isolated locales of earlier, often colonial thought, is becoming, so Pugh and Chandler suggest, a figure for the development of a relational and historical mode of thinking. They trace this island/archipelagic thinking across a cross-disciplinary body of recent literature about the contemporary world, suggesting that islands promote types of decolonial storytelling about the world’s contemporary predicaments that revolve around resilience, patchworks, and correlation. For those of you interested in the more-than-human, in ocean (hi)stories, in decolonialization, and in a patchy Anthropocene, there is much to think about in this book.  

We hope you will join us in this thinking out loud to each other. You can do so by reading the book, concentrating if you like, on the chapters 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6.

Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds is available for free at https://www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk/site/books/m/10.16997/book52/

BLUE member Nils Bubandt will start off the discussion with a few questions. 

To sign up for the workshop (to be held on Zoom), send an email to Johanne Tarpgaard at tarpgaard@cas.au.dk.

Please feel free to circulate this invitation to friends and colleagues.